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Wolfwood has to drag her away from July.
Meryl knows, even as she’s screaming and kicking at him, that she’s being irrational, entirely at the mercy of the grief ripping at her insides like Millions Knives’ scything tentacles of blades.
She knows. She knows.
She knows there’s nothing left in that crater, and anything that is will be too irradiated to touch. There’s nothing she can do, nothing she can save.
If Vash is alive — if Vash is alive —
“We can go back,” Wolfwood says, his voice a high, sharp note of strain. “We can go back, okay, shortie? We’ll go back. We’ll look for him, just not right now, please.”
He’s lying. He’s lying to her. He’ll never come back here, not as long as he lives, she can feel it in the vivid line of tension in his body, the lurching pounding of his heart, so desperate to flee he doesn’t care about the derringer Meryl keeps hammering against his jaw and cheek, trying to make him stop, trying to make it all stop.
Meryl’s throat spasms, and a sob rips out of her. Behind them, There’s a smoking, steaming crater where there used to be a city of millions. Roberto’s back there, immolated, unburied. Vash is there, dead or — or —
The hope burns worse than the grief. That he might have lived, that he might still be there, in the irradiated crater, and she can’t reach him. She can’t put her arms around him and tell him it’s all right, it’s over now, she’s still here.
Wolfwood stops moving. Meryl’s stopped fighting him without realizing, hanging from his side, the derringer pressed hard against the line of his throat, barrel tucked under his chin.
“Gonna shoot me, little miss?” he asks, his voice hoarse, like he’s the one who’s been screaming. She can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but his mouth is quivering, throat tightening on a harsh swallow.
Meryl shuts her eyes against the sting of tears. “I’m out of bullets,” she whispers into his coat.
They’re past the dunes now, the hot wind blowing outward from July fading into the bitter chill of the night air. Wolfwood staggers a few more steps forward, then sinks down in the sand, Meryl draped over his lap.
“Shame,” he mumbles, wrapping his hand over hers on the derringer. His hands aren’t quite so big as Vash’s, but still smother hers completely, as he pushes the gun away from his face, tucking her arm against her chest, pulls her tighter to his chest.
Meryl can hear the thud of his heartbeat like a drum beneath her ear, the uneven shudder of his breath. His skin is fever-warm.
He’s shaking. A fine, all-over tremor, too light to be a shiver, too bone-deep to be just the rattle of adrenaline that’s been running through Meryl for hours upon hours now, ever since the glass dome over the garden cracked, right as Roberto was kissing her neck —
Something wet hits her forehead. She opens her eyes, raw from the sand and tears and the horrible, beautiful light. Above her, Wolfwood’s face is crumpled with silent grief, cheek starting to bruise where she hit him with the derringer, the moonlight turning the tears on his cheeks to ribbons of silver.
When he catches her looking, he ducks his head, briefly loosening his grip on her to wipe his face on his sleeve. She expects some half-baked sand in my eyes excuse, but instead he just settles his arms around her again and squeezes her tight, like a kid with a stuffed animal, gaze turned up toward the moons.
She shuts her eyes again.
Meryl doesn’t know how long they sit there, Wolfwood’s body curled over hers, the sand working its way into their clothes. Maybe she falls asleep, maybe the time passes without her knowledge, but eventually, the child sun rises over the horizon, prickling at the edge of Meryl’s awareness.
Wolfwood glances down at her as she stirs. His face is an unfeeling mask again, purpled with bruising.
“Sorry for hitting you,” Meryl rasps, her voice coming out raw. She feels raw, all through herself.
He shakes his head and dumps her unceremoniously out of his lap into the sand, pushing himself up on one knee and reaching for the Punisher. “On your feet, little miss,” he mumbles, sounding like Meryl feels. “We need water and supplies and shelter before the suns get too high.”
Meryl can’t do anything but follow him, down to the base of the dune and up the next. Her whole body aches with every step, her muscles and joints and bones and something she vaguely processes as hunger in the pit of her stomach.
But Wolfwood keeps walking, so she does too.
At the top of the dune, she turns to look back. She catches a single glimpse of the crater that was once July, still smoking, just starting to swarm with bodies — survivors, saviors and scavengers impossible to distinguish at this distance — like maggots over a corpse.
Then Wolfwood’s hand comes down over her eyes. She shrieks and kicks at him, but he doesn’t let go. He leads her over the far side of the dune with his fingers still clamped over her face.
She thinks he’s trying to tease her, needle at her to try to make her laugh, but it isn’t funny, not here, not right now, and she’s opening her mouth to tell him that, but his expression is somber when he lets her go, a little panicked.
“You ever heard the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?” he asks.
Meryl’s family wasn’t ever religious — as unreligious as they could be, when the church was everywhere. She knows some of the stories, distantly. She doesn’t really want to hear that one again, not with what’s behind them, so she just nods.
Wolfwood’s eyes are wide behind his glasses. “Lot’s wife, as they were fleeing, she looked back, and turned into a pillar of salt.”
He looks pale. She didn’t know he was this religious — or maybe it’s just superstition. At this point, now that the Church’s angels have ripped a gouge out of the land, she doesn’t quite know which is which.
Carefully, Meryl reaches out, putting her hand on his elbow. The child sun is barely up and the fabric is already getting warm — she doesn’t know how he survives the day in it. “I’m still here.”
For a second, she thinks he’s going to cry. His mouth crumples up, and the breath he pulls in sounds thick and wounded.
Then he turns away and keeps walking, fast enough she has to jog to catch up, and by the time she does he’s done that thing with his face again, put it away under a mask.
“July has satellite towns,” Wolfwood says, out to the horizon. His voice is a flat, cold wall. “We’ll find one of those. Stock up, rest. Wait for the worms and the bandits to have first pick of the corpse. I’m not fighting them for it, not today. Not like this.”
Meryl can’t bring herself to argue. It’s as close to an admittance of weakness as she’ll ever have from him — that he’s as tired as she is, as hurt, as stricken. “I thought it looked like a corpse, too,” she says, watching his shoulders stiffen. “With worm larvae crawling all over it.”
Without looking, Wolfwood reaches back and grabs her hand. “I didn’t look,” he whispers. For a moment, she can hear all the raw pain in his voice. “Don’t look back, shortie. It’s easier that way.”
She picks a point in the distance, a heat-shimmer that might be a mirage or might be salvation, keeps her eyes on that, hand holds tight to his hand.